Towards a renegotiation of Casino’s debt to ensure the group’s future? The original Saint-Etienne distributor has given itself until Tuesday, May 23 to launch a possible conciliation procedure with its creditors. The idea is to seek the help of the Paris Commercial Court to find an amicable solution. It is necessary to appoint conciliators, intermediaries to negotiate with Casino’s creditors – mainly banks, such as BNP and Crédit Agricole – who have lent it money and thus give themselves some time. It takes at least four months for Jean-Charles Naoury’s group to find a way out of the crisis.
>> Rallye, parent company of Casino, launches conciliation proceedings with creditors
This file is complex and highly technical, but the Casino group has no other choice but to restructure this debt which weighs it down, that is to say, to develop it or to sell it necessarily at a steep discount, or even cancel part of it. Because Casino does not come out of it. The supermarket chain burns cash, spends to pay off its debt, lowers its prices, sells off and loses market share.
Casino is therefore playing its survival if it does not get rid of this colossal debt that it has accumulated for years, caused by buying brands like Cdiscount, Franprix, Monoprix, or Naturalia. But no investor will come to his rescue in this situation. Among them, there is in particular Daniel Kretinsky, the Czech businessman who already owns 10% of the brand. Last month, he offered to inject more than a billion euros into the group, but on one condition: that Casino relieves itself of this burden. He is not the only one. Entrepreneurs like Xavier Niel and Mathieu Pigasse, via the Teract group attached to Intermarché, have also expressed their interest in the brand.
Employee concerns
In reality, Casino does not want to choose and seeks to capture these two takeover proposals, which it considers complementary. Kretinsky’s offer to bring it new money and give it financial impetus and that of Teract-Intermarché to form an alliance and improve its store offer, play on complementarity in central purchasing, etc.
Even if, for the moment, no redundancy plan has been mentioned, the concern of employees is great. Casino has 200,000 employees worldwide, including a quarter in France and no less than 9,000 stores in France. A new page will therefore open for this centenary distributor, whose head office is still in Saint-Etienne, in the Loire.